The corncrake has recovered from near extinction in Britain through targeted grassland management that protects nesting females and chicks during hay cutting.
Hay cutting in the direction that surrounds corncrakes traps females on nests and cuts down chicks, causing direct mortality and preventing reproduction. Individual corncrakes die painful deaths under machinery while the population-level welfare effect is the elimination of breeding success. Simple management changes that cost relatively little prevent this suffering entirely. The corncrake recovery demonstrates that evidence-based, farmer-supported conservation can reverse dramatic declines affecting thousands of individual birds.